Kindergarten - December 2019

“As soon as the children find something that interests them they lose their instability and learn to concentrate.” Maria Montessori

This begins my favorite time of the kindergartener’s year, when we start finding new things to explore together. Our classroom work becomes about their interests. We had a day where we wondered if Anansi the Spider and Spider-man were really the same person? We determined that no they were not. We were curious about how far we would have to dig through the earth’s crust to reach magma? It was pretty far but we are convinced that the Kindergarten class can do it this year! We have started exploring different fruits that we haven’t tasted before in snack. The jury is still out on pomegranate. We have started to “track” wildlife( mostly bunnies) on our outings. We learned that being quiet is really hard. Of course our biggest and most involved recent exploration has been about the Nutcracker. They wanted to create Nutcracker puppets so we talked about what props and sets are, and what we would need to make a puppet theater. Our most recent wondering is; Why are herbivores some of the biggest dinosaurs and biggest animals on earth? Get back to us if you have any insight! All of these wonderings take us to books, puzzles, measurements, labeling and more. But they are focused on learning about what interests them.

They are largely independent during their Kindergarten cycle these days. They ask each other for help with new jobs or new work. They mediate conflicts amongst themselves and they clean up on their own (most of the time). We become only necessary when they have something they cannot do on their own, like making copies, or finding craft sticks to make puppets. Kindergarten this year is a group of voracious readers. Many of them spend their entire work cycles reading, writing and matching words. Sometimes our role as teachers is to provide reminders, that we are not yet ready for the next level and we have more work to do yet.

We continue to be a happy group, focused on working with our friends and spending time together!

Sincerely,

Kate & Ambra